Big Site Updates

You may have noticed over the past couple of days that the website is looking somewhat different. The primary reason for the change was as a result of a pretty nasty bout of trackback spam that occured over the first few days of the week with every single posting that allowed trackbacks being hit with multiple occurences plugging gambling sites.

Anyway, I’d been hearing good things about a couple of WordPress plugins, one called Spam Karma, that brought together a number of spam busting techniques, and the other, called Bad Behavior, took a different tack, in that it monitors the web requests, and identifies which are real people looking at the pages, and which are the automated spam bots that scan the internet looking for likely targets. Having spent a load of time removing the rubbish, I decided to check out the plugins.

This led to another problem, in that I hadn’t yet got round to upgrading WordPress from 1.2.2, as a result of the fairly heavy customisations I had made. So as of Wednesday I cleared the website down to nothing, and rebuilt it in WordPress 1.5.1.2, adding Bad Behavior and Spam Karma, hence the new look.

Thus far, the new version seems great, and a definite improvement. Plus I haven’t had to do any more clearing up thanks to Bad Behavior and Spam Karma.

Incidentally, if you want an indication of the size of the spam problem, the stats for both plugins are shown right at the very bottom of the page. As you can see, nothing has got through to Spam Karma yet, but that is because of the effectiveness of Bad Behavior, blocking hundreds of bots a day!